Top-level Design Of E-administration: International Comparison And China’s Strategies

E-administration is a new practices in government. With the further developmentof e-administration, issues such as unsmooth management system and mechanism,insufficient overall planning, and inconspicuous public service benefits rises. To thisend, the Twelfth Five-year Plan of E-government proposed to comprehensively promotee-administration top-level design, therefore, top-level design has recently become thekey issue in the field of e-government. However, the development of top-level designtheory and methods is inadequate. In this case, some scholars began to draw onexperience from the practice of foreign governments in enterprise architecture. However,because of their focuses are limited to technical reference models, the whole picture ofenterprise architecture practice is ignored. Therefore, this study attempts to build ananalysis framework of government enterprise architecture. Use this framework, theenterprise architecture practice of United States, Denmark and Netherlands is compared.In addition to the introduction, this paper consists of three parts.The first part explains the basic concepts of e-administration top-level design. Theconcepts of top-level design and enterprise architecture are analyzed and defined. SinceI believe that there are critical inconsistencies between these two concepts, therelationship of top-level design and enterprise architecture is analyzed.The second part is an international comparison of enterprise architecture practice.An analysis framework consist of four aspects—philosophy, institution, mechanism and tool—is built. Use this framework, the enterprise architecture practice of United States,Denmark and Netherlands is compared.The third part discusses promoting strategy of China’s e-administration top-leveldesign. On the basis of principles of promoting e-administration top-level design, Iproposed the promoting strategy of China’s e-administration top-level design in fouraspects that have been mentioned before. That is, clearly define issues and goals,establish specialized agencies and encourage multi-stakeholder involvement,appropriately combine central coordination and local autonomy, and develop referencemodels and practice guidelines.Under the chaotic understanding of e-administration top-level design in China, Ihope that the finding of this paper will be able to promote top-level of e-administrationin China.